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If you build it, they will come. That's the hope of AEG CEO and President Tim Leiweke as his company prepares to break ground on Farmer's Field in an effort to attract an NFL team to Los Angeles. (Published Sunday, July 24, 2011)

If you build it, they will come.

That's the hope of AEG CEO and President Tim Leiweke as his company prepares to break ground on Farmer's Field in an effort to attract an NFL team to Los Angeles.

"The commissioner has encouraged us to talk to anyone and everyone that wants to talk to us and we've done that," Leiweke told NBC4. "

Leiweke said unlike many cities hoping to subsidize a football stadium with tax revenue, his company is willing to pay for the stadium outright—and that may be the secret to luring a team to Los Angeles.

"Some of the teams that are playing in old stadiums that are non-competitive especially in the new economics of the NFL, we're going to have teams that want to move to LA," Leiweke said.

AEG is ready to break ground the first part of next year on the stadium, according to Leiweke.

"We have an owner here that has the capability of stepping up and saying 'this is about a billion-and-a-half-dollars I'm going to have to risk and I'm prepared to do it.'"

The project is estimated to cost nearly $1 billion. Leiweke said the 65,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof would be built on the site of the western hall of the Convention Center.

A 30-year naming-rights deal with Farmers Insurance Exchange, potentially worth $700 million, would help underwrite some of the cost.

The plan is one of two stadium proposals with hopes of attracting an NFL team to Los Angeles for the first time since 1995, when the Rams moved to St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland.